24 May 2009

Book Works presents New Titles

LATEST PUBLICATIONS by Book Works


Kidnapping Mountains by Slavs and Tatars (2009)

Kidnapping Mountains is a playful and informative, exploration of the muscular stories, wills, and defeat inhabiting the Caucasus region. Comprising two parts: an eponymous section addressing the complexity of languages and identities on the fault line of Eurasia, and Steppe by Steppe, a restoration of the regions seemingly reactionary approaches to romance.

Slavs and Tatars are a collective devoted to an area east of the former Berlin Wall and west of the Great Wall of China known as Eurasia, who redeem an oft-forgotten, romantic sphere of influence between Slavs, Caucasians and Central Asians. With texts by Victoria Camblin and Payam Sharifi.

ISBN 978 1 90602 19 9—Price £15.00


Bubble Entendre by Mark Waugh (2009)

1. A terrorist siege at Claridge's in 2012 replaces the Olympics as end of the world TV spectacle. An en suite novel is curated around a series of subjects forced to strip naked and perform like pornstars for a watching world.

2. Hard-boiled noir meets classic French theory as a zombie author transgresses the outer limits of postmodern fiction. The warped narrative plunges from art house to grindhouse and back again.

3. An insanely unofficial fictional updating of Derrida's 'Of Grammatology'. Think '24 Hour Party People' as directed by Kenneth Anger after he'd croaked and crawled on all fours through the furthest recesses of hell.

Brazen sadists, high-flying hopheads, invisible strippers and the destiny of objects are just some of the themes tackled by Mark Waugh in Bubble Entendre, a tripartite, literary bender. Dirty, dingy and drug fuelled, Willhelm Reich might have penned this book if he'd been force-fed LSD and subjected to a steady diet of dubstep and grime.

ISBN 978 1 906012 12 0—Price £8.00


Rape New York by Jana Leo (2009)

Starting with a rape in the author's own apartment, this experimental autobiographic novel defies traditional rape narratives by exploring the complex relationship between domestic violence, urban planning and a corrupt property market. Moving from police distinterest and landlord culpability, via way of a Robocop narrative, prison statistics and a B-movie hit-and-run ending, Jana Leo maps the fault lines of capitalist property speculation and the intersection of sexual crime, class vulnerability and the US justice system.

ISBN 978 1906012 14 4—Price £8.00


The Happy Hypocrite–Volatile Dispersal, Speed and Reading, issue 3
edited by Maria Fusco (2008–)

Presenting: a reprint in entirety of A Great Book Primer: Essays on Liberal Education, the Uses of Reading and the Rules of Reading, published by the Great Books Foundation, Chicago (1955). Seemingly useless when divorced from the complete series of Great Books, this primer exists as both an archaic set of rules, and open-ended set of possibilities. In this spirit the editing process happens outside the journal in the form of a parley-based art writing festival at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in August 2009, with new commissions selected from invitation and open submission.

ISBN 978 1 906012 11 3—Price £8.00


Fair Use (Notes From Spam)
by Graham Parker (2009)

Graham Parker's Fair Use considers the reviled phenomenon of spam e-mails, as a symptom of globalisation and as part of a historical continuum of deceptions played out through the communications technologies of each age.

Taking the form of a heavily (and spuriously) footnoted account of key moments in communication history, Parker's associative archive ranges from US computer landfill sites in Nigeria to server farms in Virginia; from maps of nineteenth-century railroads to websites charting the current spread of a rogue seaweed through ships' ballast tanks; from fake timelines of the last 200 years drawn from spam source code, to accounts of the historical origin of archetypal confidence tricks; from screen-grabs of spectral banking websites to the physical 'big stores' of depression-era long con tricks, interspersed with images of Parker's own artworks and fragments of his crowded mail inbox.

ISBN 978 1 906012 04 5—Price £14.95


What's My Name?
by Karl Holmqvist

Informed by the strategies of dada, fluxus and beat writing, Karl Holmqvist's fuses concrete poetry with cut-up techniques in anti-hierarchical monochromatic texts often presented as self-effacing awkward live performance. Here, the text slowly reveals itself as the modified but recognizable lyrics to pop songs. Eschewing the authenticity of creativity and the idolatry of pop celebrity, Holmqvist prioritizes the cover version, and subtly mocks the machismo of pop celebrity with his queer interventions. WHAT'S MY NAME? contains sixty-six poems, reworking the lyrics of artists that range from Grace Jones and Chicks on Speed to The Rolling Stones.

ISBN 978 1 906012 18 2—Price £12.00


28 MAY 2009—LAUNCH PARTY FOR ALL THESE TITLES